The Apache Software Foundation

Apache Corporate Organization Chart

At a high level, organizational governance at the Apache Software Foundation
(ASF) is fairly simple: the Members elect a Board of Directors;
the Board appoints various officers and creates PMCs; and
the officers and PMCs report periodically to the board.

Existing Members nominate and elect new members periodically, and
annually they nominate and elect 9 Directors to the board.

The board appoints officers, and delegates responsibility. For
example, the VP, Legal Affairs Committee is responsible for setting
legal policy for the ASF and all Apache projects, and working with
corporate counsel.

Officers report directly to the board on a monthly basis.

The board creates and updates Project Management Committees (PMCs).
In most cases, the board simply ratifies properly constructed
requests from the Incubator (to graduate podlings to TLPs), or from
the PMCs themselves (to add or remove PMC members). In each case,
the relevant PMC has already voted to recommend the change to the
board.

PMCs report directly to the board quarterly. The board exercises
organizational oversight of PMCs, ensuring that they are
functioning as a healthy and meritocratic community, and that they
are following Apache policies. The board does not provide
technical governance; that is handled within the PMC itself.

The Chair of each PMC is a Vice President of that project, and thus
is an officer of the ASF. The primary duty of the chair is to ensure
that the project's reports are complete and submitted to the board.

PMCs vote on software product releases. This ensures that all
source code releases are acts of the ASF itself, through it's
properly governed PMC.

PMCs nominate and elect new committers to their project. PMCs also
nominate and vote on new PMC members, which the PMC then recommends
to the board that the change be made.